23KV per inch update

Nov 19, 2005 7 Replies

I had a couple of old analog Kikusui scopes that had an awful pcb layout in the CRT supply, probably 40-50 KV/inch. They would eventually accumulate dust, arc, and zap some exotic diodes [1]. The fix was to clean carefully and glop with thick conformal coating.

John

[1] This was in the cheapie Z-axis coupling circuit. Classic scopes had two transformer-isolated negative supplies, one for the CRT cathode and one for the grid, with the cold ends driven by the intensity control and the unblanking pulse. The cheapie circuit combines AC coupling with a modulated-level ac carrier that's rectified on the high side to achieve sorta-net DC coupling to the grid.

A few years ago I did some testing for a MEMS based optical switch and we found that a 5mil spacing between traces on the surface (covered with solder mask) broke down at about 2KV while buried traces broke down at about 6KV.

That works out to about 400KV/Inch on the surface and 1.2MV/Inch for buried traces.

We are using voltages of

I finally got tired of the noise and switched off the supply. The bit of FR4 which had 23KV per inch on it shows no signs of a problem. This is a lot longer than I need it to survive in the production case.


-- kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

In article , Kevin wrote: [...]

I was running the test at RH=100%. There was a pool of water under it the whole time.

ASCII ART

------------Plastic-bag------------- =wires========PCB !

------ -------- ! ! ! !plastic ! ! ! ! ! ! Block ! water ! ! ! --=======------------- ! ----------------------------

The bag was wrapped tightly where the wire came in to keep all the water vapor in.

-- kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

I would be concerned about salty environments being lots worse, if that's possible.

In article , Ian Stirling wrote: [.. 23KV/inch ...]

I don't expect salt to get to the PCB. It does bring up a good point about ions. I'll have to check into what ionic stuff can be in vapor form.

-- kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

carbon dioxide (carbonic acid), hydrogen chloride (hydrochloric acid), and ammonia (ammonium hydroxide) are three fairly common gas forms of ionic substances.

Bye. Jasen

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